March 12, 2012

I frequently post excerpts from serious articles that sound as if I wrote them as parodies. But here's a terrific section from a New York Times article Australia's Changing View of the Dingo by James Gorman and Christine Kenneally that hits on about a half dozen or more iSteve golden oldie themes in a row. This stuff is just plain interesting. You have to work hard to convince yourself you aren't interested in the human equivalents of these topics. And that just makes you boring and dull-witted.

Dingoes are generally classified as a subspecies of wolf, Canis lupus dingo, although in the past they have been classified as a subspecies of dog and as a separate species.

As a long-time critic of both thinking of human racial groups as "subspecies" and of proclaiming that Race Does Not Exist because of the problems with the subspecies concept I'm always on the lookout for news of scientists being befuddled about how to classify other animals, especially ones as well-known to us as canines.

Linnaeus did a tremendous job of classifying plants and animals into useful, reasonable categories, but the categories are for our convenience. I've argued that what people are most interested in about other people are not their Linnaean classification, but who their relatives are. Thus, a racial group is an extended family that has more coherence and continuity than run of the mill extended families because it is inbred to some degree.

By way of analogy, think about a very expensive type of animal for whom we know the entire genealogy going back scores of generations: the thoroughbred racehorse. The color of the coat is of little interest to buyers and bettors. They don't need to classify bays and grays separately because they know the actual genealogy of every horse: e.g., Seabiscuit was the grandson of Man o' War while his archrival War Admiral was the son of Man o' War and therefore Seabiscuit's uncle.

Now, we don't know the genealogy of individual dingos, so we study how they look, how they behave, any archaeological record, and their DNA to figure out how to classify them for important purposes of our own, such as Australia's equivalent of the Endangered Species Act. But, scientists still wind up arguing over how to classify them because classifications are something we impose for our own purposes. The only thing that inevitably exists is genealogy: father, mother, child.

Physically, they resemble a generic, medium-size dog, about 40 pounds, usually tan-colored, with pricked ears and a bushy tail.

If you let dogs mate randomly, as in much of the Third World, that's typically about what you wind up with. The dingo is distinctive looking in some ways, but in general looks like the Indian pariah dog of the streets. A 2004 DNA study said dingos were more closely related to Chinese dogs, but both seem pretty close to the Default Dog.

The rest of this excerpt is equally interesting.

They do not have some of the physical signs of domestication found in many dog breeds, like barking as adults. They breed once a year, like wolves, and when undisturbed they have a stable pack structure topped by one male-female pair, the only ones in the pack that reproduce.

Bradley Smith, a research associate in public health at Flinders University in Adelaide who has studied dingoes, said by e-mail that experimental tests put dingoes closer to wolves in the kind of intelligence they display. “Both dingoes and wolves, being highly effective predators, are great at problem solving, working well in groups, and independent problem solving,” he said.

But they also understand humans in a way that wolves do not. They get it when a person points at something, while wolves are clueless or supremely uninterested. Dingoes are not as good as dogs, however, at following a human’s gaze.

Dingoes, Dr. Smith wrote, “seem to be a prime example of one of the first types of ‘dogs’. Not domestic dogs as we know them now, but some form of early dog that made it easier for the human-canid relationship to develop. You could almost say dingoes are frozen in time — as they have made a very good home in Australia and have been isolated for many thousands of years.”

Dingoes came to Australia 3,500 to 5,000 years ago, probably with Asian seafarers, and already at least partly domesticated. At the time, people had been on Australia for almost 50,000 years, without dogs. The dingo quickly became an essential part of Aboriginal life and stories.

Deborah Rose, a professor at Macquarie University in Sydney who has done research with Aboriginal peoples and is the author of “Dingo Makes Us Human,” said the dingoes were a deep part of Aboriginal life. “The dingoes had names, they had kinship classifications, which makes them so unlike all other animals in Australia,” she said. “They had a place at the campfire.” Or even closer. The phrase “three-dog night” has been attributed to indigenous Australians as a way of describing how cold it was. However, it does not seem that Aborigines bred dingoes selectively.

Wikipedia has a less well-written but even more extensive article on dingoes and all the controversies involving their racial purity that are a big deal in Australia for legal and other reasons.

51 comments:

It is also interesting that the Australian aborigines did not manage to make any progress at all on the further domestication of the dingo -- this is similar to sub-Saharan Africans who made no progress on any domestication of wild animals but imported and bred domesticated animals from Europe/Asia.

It took me years of pointing to get my, now deceased, former dog to get the ball or stick. Still sometimes I wasn't sure it was just my tone of voice, higher for closer and lower for father away that did it. I have another puppy now and I plan on pointing and then moving in on the object, maybe she'll get it then. But no matter what there is something magical about that inter species communication at a distance.However after living in DC for over twenty years I am not too sure about the inter sub species communication at a distance.

As you must know, Steve, modernday genetic science has come on leaps and bounds and the concept of 'genetic clustering' of components of autosomal DNA shows quite clearly whom is related to whom.You've must have seen this charts on Dienekes' and other sites where spatial plots using DNA components and geographic distance of various European ethnicities are made - and how genetic distance correlates very well with geographical distance. The work of Cavalli-Sforza is interesting too - he expresses genetic distance in terms of coeffecients of relatedness.I believ his work was done before the DNA revolution and used blood serum reactivity to gauge relatedness.

1) The Azaria Chamberlain case has been in the news a lot lately, and her parents insist that it was a dingo which carried the poor girl away and < END OF SENTENCE CENSORED FOR PURPOSES OF FAMILY VIEWING AT iSTEVE >.

2) We live out in the country, on a farm, and we used to have a fox come around every evening, and stand off on the edge of the field [by the woods], and bark at our dog.

We always figured that it was a she-fox, begging for a little of that alpha-male action from the Big Dawg, but rather recently, I came to discover that our foxes [Vulpes vulpes] have the wrong* chromosome count [2n = 38] for breeding with Canis [2n = 78].

Of course, the mathematics would be pretty interesting, too - to try to figure out how n=38 became n=39 [which then became 2n=78] at the same time that n=38 was also heading in the direction of 2n=38.

Before he died, von Neumann posed this sort of thing as a challenge for future mathematicians working in mathematical biology - to gather as much information as possible on the extant species' DNA, and then to work backwards so as to recreate as much as possible of the grand evolutionary scheme of things - ideally with a view towards recreating the entire history of the Tree of Life.

You have to work hard to convince yourself you aren't interested in the human equivalents of these topics.

Most people I know rarely draw inferences from zoology to humans. People have a natural inclination to see themselves as separate from animals and nature. They (at least modern people) also have a corresponding contradictory adolescent and young adult tendency to blame society for this "conditioned" alienation.

Natural alienation is something that environmentalists complain about incessantly, but of course they never consider or will allow the ramifications that come with an integrated naturalist view.

Since the words "race" and "racial" and "racist" provoke such strong emotional reactions in people, maybe it would be better to drop them entirely and to talk about "breeds" instead.

All the dog and cat owners in America are already familiar with the concept that different breeds of dogs and cats are different, so they can make the logical leap to the conclusion that different breeds of humans are also different.

Like dingos, a quintessential African breed, basenji, seems very "under-domesticated". Does not bark, comes into heat only once a year. Any similarity, of course, pure co-incidence - don'teventhinkaboutit. Basenji does have one unique African trait: it's the only dog that climbs trees. Weird.

I actually owned a Basenji, the quintessential feral dog. It is very similar to the Dingo, but from central Africa. Although it's nominally domesticated, it has all the characteristics of the wild canid, including the once a year estrus.

One typical feature of the feral dog is that it has ZERO desire to please humans. Although they are very interesting animals in a "National Geographic" kind of way, they're a nightmare to own. They are close to untrainable.

That's what brought me to the conclusion that "nothing good ever came out of Africa". My experience of owning a Basenji is what opened me to reading and agreeing with HBD blogs, believe it or not.

Even though my Basenji was a show dog, three points shy of a championship, I finally gave up and gave her to someone who had owned them before and was up for the challenge. I never regretted it, and I rejoice in the lack of chaos in my home since I got rid of that beast.

i have played with full size real wolves who grew up as pets and they are smart, but they are clearly not dogs. they are, barely, trainable, and not interested in what humans want. their instinct is to chase and bite, a mere step away from hunt and kill.

i used to go to mexico about 3 times a year and mexico does not have animal control (another thing taken completely for granted in first world nations that instantly goes away the moment you cross the border). not only are there wandering cows, there are random dogs every where, sometimes the mexicans even let them in shops and bars, where they sit attentively, waiting for your nachos to fall, or perhaps for a sip of beer.

they didn't seem to have bred themselves into dingo form, but they weren't that far away. they did have a generic mutt appearance and only a few breed specific distinguishing features from dog to dog. but still, those few distinct features were there.

dog breeds are obsolete, pretty much. they are from a low technology time period, when humans actually needed dogs. we don't need dogs now. they're fun, and i love dogs. but there's no need for 80 breeds of dogs when you can function your entire life without a single dog. sometimes when i watch the dog show it just boggles my mind, why they needed such finely tuned breeds, when it seems like 20 or so dogs would certainly get the job done. most breeds seem redundant.

maybe dogs were like guns for year 1800 guys in europe. an interesting way to fill time and work on a project. we definitely have more small arm designs than we need in 2012, but gunsmiths and engineers keep coming up with more. we could easily get by with only 30 or so guns, that's plenty to kill everything on earth. yet there's probably 300 basic designs.

Wolves as hunting and working dogs in early Pennsylvania:http://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2011/10/11/wolves-as-working-and-hunting-dogs-in-pennsylvania/The Kentucky frontier wasn’t the only place that wolves were used as hunting dogs. Wolves were also commonly used as hunting dogs on the Pennsylvania frontier. They were also crossbred with “improved” Western dogs to make superior working animals, but the practice was largely discontinued when it was decided that every farm ought to have a “purebred” collie or shepherd.(...)

dog breeds are obsolete, pretty much. they are from a low technology time period, when humans actually needed dogs. we don't need dogs now. they're fun, and i love dogs. but there's no need for 80 breeds of dogs when you can function your entire life without a single dog. sometimes when i watch the dog show it just boggles my mind, why they needed such finely tuned breeds, when it seems like 20 or so dogs would certainly get the job done. most breeds seem redundant.

I've always wanted to know if dhole/dog hybrids are possible and whether they would be at least partly fertile. I believe Cuon shares the same chromosome count as Canis so it might be possible. You'd probably have to resort to artificial insemination to do it since the animals won't interact sexually under ordinary circumstances, but the Russians have used AI to breed jackal/dog hybrids so why not?

Dholes exhibit serious pack behavior like wolves and dogs, but unlike most other canids such as foxes and coyotes. However, their pack behavior and structure is said to be different than that of dogs and wolves: they're gregarious and cooperative hunters, but don't exhibit much territoriality and seem to have less hierarchy compared to wolves. In spite of these seemingly gentler psychological features, they've been known to mob animals as fierce as tigers and sloth bears.

We had a pariah dog in my teens (in Malaysia). He was a puppy that ducked into our compound after presumably coming off worst in a dog-fight (!) in the pack. Looked exactly like all the examples of feral dogs mentioned above, as did the other dogs in the pack (this was in the 80s, since then the stray population problem has been brought to heel :-)).

He was an intelligent dog with the sweetest temperament of all our other dogs (these were thoroughbreds). Its unusual that feral dogs revert to an undomesticated phenotype with respect to their physical characteristics, while the traits that were selected for domestication (docility, obedience) are retained.

We live out in the country, on a farm, and we used to have a fox come around every evening, and stand off on the edge of the field [by the woods], and bark at our dog.

I live in suburban England and Ive had a fox do that outside my house, our bitch went chasing after the fox but made no contact. Then a few minutes later the fox came back and the whole circus began again. Went on for what seemed like hours.

It really takes a huge leap of the imagination for humans to start breeding animals selectively, and I don't think the idea is self-evident at all.

After all, if you capture your two favourite dingos and have them mate, you will get another dingo, and then much ridicule from your fellow tribesmen for the first 25 generations of your slightly improved wild dogs.

In the 17:th century King Charles XI of Sweden, according to legend, wanted to domesticate elk to set up a cavalry. The effort failed. It would have been an impressive sight on the battlefield, though.

"...we don't need dogs now. they're fun, and i love dogs. but there's no need for 80 breeds of dogs when you can function your entire life without a single dog. "

I could funtion my entire life living under an overpass in a mild climate and eating out of cans but I sure as hell wouldn't want to.

Quality of life counts for a lot. Dogs confer all sorts of health benefits on humans that greatly improve their quality of life and in some cases, help safeguard their lives.

I do agree the whole breeding thing has got way out of control. Our poor little bulldog, who we got "rehomed" (which is basically a euphemism for a rescue) looks positively grotesque. Her parents should never have been allowed to breed. She is very healthy, though, and has a wonderful temperament; gets along beautifully with all humans, our 3 cats and unruly OEB.

I would rehome one of the bull breeds again in a heartbeat but would never buy any purebred dog from a breeder, however reputable.

Growing up in Washington DC in the early 1960's, there were still packs of wild dogs that would roam the city. We took one in as a newborn puppy -- it looked like the quintessential pariah dog -- brown, curly tail, barrel chest and stumpy legs.

That dog was utterly untrainable -- never even learned to walk on a leash without strangling itself. It was very gentle and patient with our immediate family, but otherwise eager to kill anything it could sink its teeth into -- four legged or two legged.

The interesting question is why they revert to a dingo mean and not a wolf mean from which they originated.

Maybe they are reverting to the wolf mean. Indian wolves (also found in the Middle East all the way to the Sinai peninsula) look quite different from their European, North Asian, and North American counterparts. This wolf is from Pakistan. Another subspecies, the Arabian wolf, is also a lot more dingo-like in appearance. Indian wolves are notorious for snatching children so the "dingos ate my baby" meme may not be far from the truth.

The bigger, badder North Eurasian wolves may be behaviorally different and wolf/dog hybrids of this type can be difficult to train to say the least. I've actually encountered a few F1 wolf dogs and none of them seemed like great pets. Their personalities are very difficult to read and they're still pretty wild. I think the lady in that clip had it right: we've selected against wolfish traits and hybrids are more likely to be confused than enhanced.

We own a carolina dog, also called an "american dingo". She's relatively normal, but I notice two things about her that are different. One is that she is ALWAYS on alert, ears are always perked, she rarely lies down outside of sleeping at night. She also has little interest in meeting new people. she doesn't get mean, she just doesn't seem to trust them. otherwise, she is one of the best dogs i've ever had. she's definetly low maintenance, though she requires more exercise than any dog i've ever owned.

I was reminded of the argument from canine biodiversity to HBD when watching Macbeth. Shakespeare was ahead of his time:

"in the Catalogue ye goe for men,As Hounds, and Greyhounds, Mungrels, Spaniels, Curres,Showghes, Water-Rugs, and Demy-Wolues are cliptAll by the Name of Dogges: the valued fileDistinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,The House-keeper, the Hunter, euery oneAccording to the gift, which bounteous NatureHath in him clos'd: whereby he does receiueParticular addition, from the Bill,That writes them all alike: and so of men"

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